


Driven and Derided

by mresundance



Series: The Grace Stories [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, M/M, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-02
Updated: 2011-02-02
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:38:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mresundance/pseuds/mresundance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>And if you want truth so badly, my friend, perhaps you had best prepare for that.</em> Sherlock, first person.</p><p>Implied sexual assault and implied torture. Rather dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Driven and Derided

**Author's Note:**

> I had originally planned this to be part of The Grace Stories, but this story turned out to be too dark . Consider it a possible, though alternate, view of events.
> 
> Beta'ed by Misanthropyray, Musicaddict_123 and Kalypso. Also special thanks to fan_eunice for pom poms and whip-cracking.

I don’t expect forgiveness. Even if I pretend not to acknowledge or admit to them, I am a man of many sins and vices. Despite the fact that I have said, not without pride, I do not have a heart and that I am ‘inhuman’; that I give the same outward appearance mountains do, something which cannot be scaled, with jagged, cold peaks and an austere, stony face. Were I to be objective, then I would have to admit that none of this is entirely true.

I would have to begin by acknowledging my love for you. Again, if I am objective, this is something I struggle with. Love is not something which seems entirely coherent in my universe, just as the order and the nature of the solar system are not entirely relevant.

But I cannot bear to think of you as irrelevant. You are, to me, like breath. Not breath in the modern sense, but breath in the ancient sense, when it was believed to carry and convey the soul.

Listening to your footsteps recede down our stairs, I cannot help but assuage my panic – an emotion which is never helpful – by retreating into a kind of dullness. I want to be numbed, emptied of emotion, of my feelings for you. In this way, I would not have to think about how you looked at me eighty-three minutes ago. It was as if you had jabbed a hand down my throat and pulled all my insides out.

Only, let me explain. Only come back long enough to let me explain. You owe me that much. Oh, I know the smell of cigarettes in the sitting room shan’t please you. But you should be here. At least let me tell you why. Then you can leave and I won’t ask anything of you ever again.

 

 

I remember how you said my name the night before. Your throaty murmur was such pleasure to me then; now it’s agony to remember.

_Sherlock, where have you been? I texted you._

In the dark, your face was careworn and your voice soft, not chiding or nagging. I still felt the hard cold of night-time London deep-set in me and I wanted nothing more than to lie down beside you and relax into your familiar warmth.

 _My phone died._ It was so easy, that lie. Just as other lies – or, more correctly, half-truths, or withheld truths – came to me so readily. I had turned my phone off.

You’d reached for me with those firm, steadying hands and held me. I used to fear that I would run like liquid through your fingers, as I have with so many of my lovers; being too shapeless and formless to hold on to. But you wouldn’t let me; you held me in those hands and kept me from dissolving. Your grasp solidified me, as it always has.

 _You didn’t forget, did you?_ Humming into my throat as if I’d already been forgiven. The sound of my trousers unzipping was delectably obscene in the dark and unusual quiet of our flat.

While it may seem trivial after recent events, I did not forget. I had been counting down in my head, all day, numbering the hours and the minutes and the seconds, down to that moment when it would be precisely one year of time between us. Precisely one year since you hooked your hand in my elbow and told me you’d wanted to kiss me.

I still adore how you stood on the tips of your toes when you did.

I could never forget, my dear doctor.

So when I replied _Of course not_ , this was not a lie. But I couldn’t finish my thoughts then, not with your hand on me. Though we are both adept with words, I think you’ll agree we do not always require them. What could I say to you with words, which are sometimes so sparse that they do little but pare back meaning, until the words themselves are barren? What can I say with words when instead I can lean up to kiss you? When I can put my mouth on you? When you can have your fingers buried in me and the only words I say are _fuck_ and _John_? The way we can speak with our bodies, with hands and lips, with low moans and sweat and with bright bursts of shuddering pleasure – sometimes this is far richer than words can be. Though far more uncertain.

The thought came to me after, when my clothes were half off, my hair even more askew and my lips raw with the taste of you. Beside me you listed between sleep and wakefulness. You were mumbling about having a proper anniversary dinner and bugger Mr. Sherlock Holmes if he didn’t fancy that idea.

 _You do that anyway._ I smiled as I said it, though I ached already, John, and the ache was not sexual.

I was thinking of my childhood, _On the Origin of Species_ and my neighbour.

 _On the Origin of Species_ was, if I may say so, very dear to me. I kept it in my bedside table and carried it with me to school, until the pages were smooth and the binding parted easily. It was very sentimental of me, I know. I loved Darwin’s logic, you see.

I thought as a child, I spake as a child; I had not yet put away my childish things. I had not developed self-control, nor any coping mechanisms to effectively rein myself. You must imagine what that was like. Even as a child, I was a creature driven and derided by my – imperfections. Sometimes I was a brute. In this instance, I must confess that I was. My neighbour had done nothing worse than performing better on a chemistry exam. I was wrung with jealousy when I mocked him.

I mocked the patches on his trousers. I mocked his wayward ginger hair. I mocked his parents, especially his mother, who had been seen with a man who was not her husband. I deserved it, then, when he knocked me down, and, taking my copy of _On the Origin of Species_ , ripped the book to pieces.

It was shattering to me then, John. It was like a death. And watching you sleep that night – that was a death to me too.

You can guess at the next part, if not explicitly, then at least in outline. There is a reason I have never told you about this episode, nor the time I poisoned Mycroft’s cat as an experiment, nor countless other minor incidents in my life, leading up to the present, to Jenny.

You must have known though, my dear doctor. You must have.

Five, John. I broke each of the fingers on his right hand. Each a _snap snap snap snap snap_ in the cold autumn afternoon. Mist poured from his lips as he shrieked and his face flushed red. He was like those little painted, porcelain dolls you see in the windows of antique shops. He was so beautiful, which only made me resent him more. If his shrieking had not alerted our parents, I am afraid I fully intended to break the fingers on his left hand as well. All for the sake of a book, a mere trifle in the larger scheme of things.

Last night as I watched you sleep, I burned with anger. I could not bear it, John. The memory of your fifteen year old self in that garden shed. The night so cold the dew had frozen stiff on the grass. Her dark hair in the moonlight as she leaned forward and put her hands on you. Did she kiss you too? Or do you remember? Or do you want to remember?

I can’t bear it, knowing you felt so alone and so helpless, like an insect being pinned to a card. It shatters me.

By contrast, I can bear what happened with Matt. Maybe I even deserved it, given the circumstances. You would think after having Matt invade my bed, vibrating with cocaine, that I would’ve been put off the stuff. A wise man would have, at least. But I can bear this, John. The memory of the sagging mattress and waiting, just waiting for time to pass. 1,020 seconds passed and I won’t convert them to minutes. I can even bear the nauseous feeling of understanding that Matt overpowered me not just physically, but by other means as well.

But I can’t bear what happened to you.

If you were only here John, if you were only bloody here like you should be, like you have been, and you had just let me explain then you would know, wouldn’t you? If I reacted so strongly to the violation of a mere trifle in my world, how else could you expect me to react to how you were violated? You carried your damage with you like your war wounds, the scars invisible to everyone but you and me. I loathed your triggers; how you braced against me as nausea and waves of panic rolled against you; the nights you became taut and anxious, circled by exhaustion and your nightmares of war and that black haired girl. Watching memories crawl out of your mind, clawed and barb toothed, to ensnare you, was – I couldn’t bear it. Seeing you suffer was agony.

If I could not alter time and go back for you, then I would dig her out of you, like shrapnel.

I had to prise her name from you. I knew you would be reluctant, to say the least, given your admirable emotional reserve. You are a man who does not waste his words or gestures on anything but what he absolutely means. I know, at the time, you thought confronting your past would not be strictly useful. I think you believed that you were fine, that you just had to deal with your triggers; that would be the rest of your life, just as your war wounds were now the rest of your life.

I made you tell me Jenny’s name, not only because it was necessary for you. Your former psychologist might have said something like it was ‘healing’. Though I thought she was an idiot, I think that the process of healing is sometimes worth investing in. Especially your healing.

But I also made you name her because I had to possess her name myself.

 

 

I don’t know why you haven’t come back, John. You are being cruel. My own voice in my own head – it comes back to me, hoarse and strange – an echo down a long dark tunnel. I feel like something discarded and thrown out in the rubbish bin. You cannot treat me this way. You said you loved me. You said it countless times. (437 times in five months, to be exact, which averages, roughly, to 2.875 times per day. There was never a day you didn’t say it. At that rate, in ten years you would have told me 10,499.5 times and in twenty 21,001.875, but those are conservative estimates.)

When you come back – after you have had a strop over the smell of cigarettes permeating the flat – and the giant chemical explosion which has rendered the microwave useless and made a very interesting burn pattern on the floor of the kitchen – after all this, I imagine that you will want to know about Jenny Moran and of the day I captured her. You did walk away from me over it, so I imagine it has to be important on some levels.

You do realise, John, that the only thing which differentiates me from members of the criminal class is not my intellect. Though, you would agree, my intellect is of a luminous and rare variety, this is not the thing which separates me, not really. Many criminals – the most interesting ones, of course – are themselves remarkably intelligent; thus, intelligence is not a distinguishing factor. The crucial difference is the choices I have made. Since I was a child, I have exerted a great deal of effort trying to master myself and my emotions, so that incidents like the one involving my neighbour became less and less frequent. I am not a murderer, but only because I have chosen not to be, though it has cost me a great deal. I have always had to control myself. Everything I am is control, tightly wound, never a step out of place, graceful as a cat, sharp as a scalpel, damaging too. If, even for a fraction of a second I let go, then – yes.

You know well the results of that. You might argue that I showed anything but control with Jenny and perhaps you would be right.

If you were here I would ask if you would like me to make a full confession, though I have never in my life felt the urge to be accountable to anyone, nor to any idea of a higher power. But I know you would say, in a voice so hard it would frighten even me – that I am accountable to you.

Fine then.

As it concerns Jenny Moran, I have been hunting her for five months. I began my pursuit almost immediately, mere hours after I wrenched her name from you.

I supposed, at first, that it would be simple to locate her. After the initial five weeks, Jenny herself, rather than the process of locating her, became much more elaborate and much more interesting. I would not suppose to bore you with all the tedious sundries, an account of the inching, painful progress I made.

But I wish you were here John and I could see your face, gauge your reactions. If I say she changed her name, no longer _Moran_ but _Brooke_ , but that she hadn’t changed it due to marital obligations, you might purse your lips. A bewildered crease would begin to form between your eyebrows, meaning I’d have to explain the circumstances surrounding her legal name change.

The change in her legal name accounted in large part for the difficulty in locating her. This may seem trivial, but she handled it very cleverly, leaving little of her old self and her old life connected with the new. She relocated to America the same year she assaulted you, if you don’t mind me using those words. She was little older when she applied for American citizenship and then changed her name. She even took the effort to re-learn her English, smoothing out her consonants and flattening her vowels, the phrase ‘trash can’ replacing ‘rubbish bin’ and ‘bangs’ replacing ‘fringe’. Even after living in another country for a time, it takes a great deal of discipline to consciously rid yourself of your mother tongue, replacing it with something altogether similar and different. This shows both discipline and a great deal of self-awareness on Jenny’s part. Yet, she didn’t change her first name. This shows something of sentimentality. As if she was reluctant to part with something about herself.

She also dyes her hair a shade of brown. The roots were beginning to show this month, though, so she’s been late to make an appointment with her hairdresser.

I know you’d grimace at me for this because you’d find it morally objectionable due to ‘privacy’. Nothing is private anymore. It was so dreadfully easy to hack into her email, at any rate, it was practically an invitation.

In one of her emails, to a friend – one of the very few friends she had, and one of the few she had revealed details of her past to – Jenny mentioned her mother was abusive. Her brother, Sebastian, as well. I know this would make you wince. I know exactly how your brows and lips would smooth into some kind of doubt and pity.

Jenny’s brother – he’s an interesting sort. Not unlike yourself: recently returned from military service. Though, unlike you, Colonel Moran’s record is speckled with implications and accusations. So he was quietly discharged. It wouldn’t do to have it in the papers that a decorated sniper in the British Army had been picking off civilians in Afghanistan for sport. He has income, I suspect, as a result of highly dubious associations, but he has remained elusive.

And Jenny, our brave, good little Jenny, has been trying to get on with the business of her life, keeping herself extracted from both her mother and her brother.

I find her marvellous and pathetic. She is distasteful. It is distasteful to me that one so successful at disappearing should be so idiotic and simple as to walk right back into London, for reasons which I cannot yet fathom. I do not know if they are relevant.

It’s almost better not having you here. Almost. You don’t _tsk_ or roll your eyes with your ‘whatever shall I do with him?’ expression when I say Jenny is distasteful to me. Sometimes I think I should like my own thoughts and words better if they all belonged to me again and if I didn’t have to share them with you. But no, that’s not true.

I gathered other information, most of which I found irrelevant. That Jenny preferred tea to coffee even after her years in a country where tea is served barbarically with ice. She is a PhD candidate for early childhood studies and, in the past, taught. Jenny has had a few intimate relationships, including a man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with. He was the father of her seven year old son, but he died, you see. Car accident. So she raises their son alone.

Stop that John, stop. Your face – you shouldn’t look so soft and so wounded for her. You are not here. If you’re not here, I don’t have to listen to your objections about what I have done, that no matter her crimes or sins, it would have been a thousand times worse to leave her child orphaned. Hundreds of thousands of children are orphaned every day. Why should this one be any different?

The night of our anniversary, I was on the verge of snatching her. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t. Of course not, if you had, we would have had an argument and you might have walked out on me then. Oh, a mere fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes earlier. But you were still mine for those fourteen hours and forty-seven minutes.

Jenny had just turned on the telly and put her son to bed. I had been trailing her all day, waiting for the opportunity to make itself known – the moment when I could safely steal her. There were countless moments I could have and I didn’t. I didn’t snatch her away that night, or any other moment that day, on account of you. Yes, you, John. I didn’t because I kept thinking of you; of how you’d tell me not to; of how you’d tell me to let it go. I thought of how much I loved you and wanted, more than to exact revenge for you, to kiss you and to hold you close to me, to cradle you in my arms like my violin and listen to you sigh sweet notes just because I am near you. So I left.

The London night was so cold and Baker Street felt so distant to me. I would have kept wandering if not for the little clock in my head, which said I had only an hour before our exact anniversary. Though you forgive me a great many things, I knew forgetting would put you in a strop, maybe for a few days. Not forever. It’s not the date itself which matters to you, but marking time, like a milestone. An achievement. I think I would agree with you. It is important. Every moment I have – have had? – with you is.

I was home and then, in the morning, I took my knife and the necessary supplies.

I knew what I was about to do could ruin us. I knew, John. I am many things but not unfeeling and certainly not an idiot. Nonetheless, there was something inside me loosed which refused to go back into the cage I had locked it. There is nothing you could have done to prevent it, not after all the anger I had felt the previous night. Nothing, short of shooting me yourself.

I suppose you are wondering how I was able to take her without drawing attention. The answer to that is simple, though I know you will patiently dislike it: I seduced her. Jenny, while a serial monogamist in the past, has had the occasional foray when single. The ‘no strings attached’ sort of thing, because she’s busy and a mother. But she still has needs, the ‘itch’ that needs scratching now and then. Based on what else I knew about Jenny and her past, I tailored myself to her needs, her tastes, her desires. I edited and revised the Sherlock Holmes you know and presented myself instead as the man who would most appeal to her.

I kissed her, if you must know, which by my own rationale is cheating. However, we did not have sex. I only needed to lure her to a place of my choosing.

I would like to say that I don’t remember anything, that I’ve strangely, oddly, wildly blocked most of it out and it has sunk into a vague haze, a blur of images and sounds which don’t make sense. But then, that would be the same ol’ same ol’, as they say, wouldn’t it? Me, lying to you, altering the truth, telling half-truths or withholding the truth. It’s an art form I have perfected and I wish you weren’t so particular about my gift of self-editing.

I remember everything.

I remember, for instance, how she shrieked, though her lips were sealed shut with tape. She shrieked until she turned red and tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. She struggled throughout the whole ordeal, John, which I found admirable. I think you might too.

You know by now I administered morphine to her, intravenously, and I suppose some of the reasons why have occurred to you. My main reason was that her consciousness would be – unstable – that she wouldn’t feel as much pain _now_ , but when the morphine wore off, she certainly would.

Don’t give me that look, even in my head – don’t. The sick, paling look. You know why I did it. And please, stop looking disgusted with me. I can’t bear it. I can’t.

And if you want truth so badly, my friend, perhaps you had best prepare for that.

Five, John. Ten altogether, twenty if I’d decided on the toes as well. There was a lovely, bare patch of her thigh, too. I would have used the same knife as the one I’ve cut apples with on our kitchen table. The one you’ve borrowed to tease me with in bed. I thought, to start, I would carve your initials into her thigh.

I know it could’ve linked you to her murder but believe me I would never allow that to happen. I would never allow you to suffer for what I’d done.

Your initials were to remind her. She’d carved herself into you once, perhaps not literally. I thought it only fair. If she survived, she’d have to look at her body and see _you_ there, a reminder, just as when you look at your body _she_ is there.

No harm came of anything in the end. I only wanted to give her a bit of a fright. I told you so. I am not entirely sure why it was necessary for you to continue pointing your gun at me. My heart skittered when you let out that sound – that low, aching sob. It sounded like you were in such pain, so much pain, but you remained steady and your jaw set. It was gorgeous. You know, I think you would have fired, if you thought it necessary. If I hadn’t backed away from Jenny and, holding my arms up, dropped the blade.

I told you and Mycroft – why won’t either of you believe me? Look at the evidence, would you? She had nothing but morphine in her system as Mycroft’s men bundled her away. Every other part of her remained intact. She will be fine. No worse for the wear. Why do you even care?

Stop looking at me that way. Stop looking at me like I am disgusting, that you have to scrub me out of you. Stop looking at me with those tired, unhappy, hurting eyes. Stop. It’s not as if I had stolen you, bound you, gagged you, drugged and threatened you.

I would never hurt you John. I would never hurt you.

 

 

My ‘inappropriate’ jokes, as you call them, do make you laugh. And sitting in the back of Mycroft’s car, you wouldn’t even look at me. You hadn’t looked at me since you’d lowered your gun. 1,635 seconds of not looking at me. I only wanted you to look at me. If you looked at me, even with disgust in your face, then something would be right. Not being seen by you is like not existing.

Though very crass, I told the joke about Jews and Santa Claus because you’d laughed at it before. It was sweet, how you hid your smile behind your hand and said, _Sherlock, that’s horrible._

When finally – _finally_ – you turned and looked at me again, my breath stopped. The silence deepened and I felt, rather than heard, words and meaning shudder and die between us.

 

 

I know, John.

I know.


End file.
